January is always a strange time of year at CloudTech HQ; the Consumer Electronics Show signifies the last vestiges of the holiday break, with the industry firmly awoken from its hibernal slumber to press ahead with 2014 deliverables.

As a result there’s plenty to find across the web – here are our favourite pieces from the last fortnight:

1) Salesforce CEO praises Oracle, slams Microsoft, and hints at analytics acquisitions [Venture Beat]:  Amid the Vegas glitz of CES, over in Manhattan Salesforce kicked off its Salesforce1 World Tour. The ensuing roundtable provided a litany of quotable opinion from CEO Marc Benioff.

Benioff called Steve Ballmer’s resignation “a very good decision…but it’s probably five years too late”, while adding that Microsoft “need[s] to push the rest button on vision.” Yet the Salesforce chief was more salutary about Oracle, saying that its tech was “an important part of …